It’s been about a year since we looked at this subject. Since then we’ve added six notable published and working papers to our bibliography of activist investing research. The bibliography represents the best available scholarly work on two significant questions, of how activist investing leads to investor returns, and how corp gov activism leads to investor returns.

We highlight a few papers each week in our weekly digest of activist investing news and commentary. We add some of the best of these papers to the bibliography.

We continue to build the theory and evidence about the returns to activist investing. Three recent papers add to that theory and evidence.

Becht, Franks, Grant, and Wagner expand the analysis to international activist situations in their working paper The Returns to Hedge Fund Activism: An International Study. And, Lilienfeld-Toal and Schnitzler focus on insider and blockholder ownership in What is Special About Hedge Fund Activism?. Each finds excess returns of 4-7% from activist investing.

A third, from law professor John Coffee of Columbia University, surveys a range of other research on the returns to activist investing. He finds the evidence “mixed” on these returns.

We also found two papers on the link between corp gov activism and shareholder returns. Professor Martijn Cremers of Notre Dame led both. His first shows how classified boards affect (both positively and negatively) shareholder value. The second analyzes corp gov changes more broadly, and concludes that these changes do lead to increased shareholder returns.

Finally, the latest paper from Brav, Jiang, and Tian extends on their earlier authoritative research on activist returns to analyze the impact of activist investing on innovation. Contrary to the popular perception that activist investors turn companies into soulless borrowers of technology, they demonstrate that activist investors make portfolio companies into more effective and efficient innovators.

Please let us know any comments about the bibliography, and any additions you’d like to see.